


she dreams a little (and she feels the dark)

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [260]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Hasty Pudding callback, I mean technically Wachiwi has an arguably canon place and I'm sure you know what it is but, Mithrim, Mithrim cats, The First Week concurrent with 'The Cold Heaven', Vaguely referenced Sioux beliefs, spirituality, title from a poem by Wallace Stevens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:14:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25101481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: She honored earth and sky. Her family died anyway. She did not cease to believe, but her belief changed.
Relationships: Arien & Original Female Character(s), Beren Erchamion & Original Female Character(s), Beren Erchamion/Lúthien Tinúviel, Fingon | Findekáno & Original Female Character(s)
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [260]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	she dreams a little (and she feels the dark)

Mithrim is a land of walls and corners. Even the lake is a boundary, a limitation.

Wachiwi would like to go hunting, but she and Beren have agreed (in private conversation) that Celegorm Feanorian has laid hold of the territory and, like many whitefaces before him, is loath to share it with anyone. Until they are very certain that he will not put one of his arrows in their backs, they will keep to the fort and its nearest lands.

“I don’t like him,” Wachiwi says, in the kitchen yard, husking corn. Haleth left them a generous array of dried corn, and though it will never be as sweet as when it was fresh, it lends variety to Mithrim’s daily stews. “He has a bow that shouldn’t belong to him.”

Beren shrugs. “I don’t know him.”

Wachiwi blows her bad temper out through her nose in one long breath. Such is the effect that Beren has on her. He is so like a younger brother, a new piece of life to comfort an old past. Of course, he is only a dozen moons separated from her in age, but he has an innocence around him…gentle stories, even for his scars. Because it makes him happy, Wachiwi does not begrudge him his friendship with Finrod, whom she also likes, even if he is peculiar. In turn, Beren does not object to Fingon, who is her favorite of their recent allies. Still, Beren’s patience sometimes stretches too far, as with Celegorm.

“I am not asking you to make war with him,” she says. She is not Haleth, nor Aredhel, two women who have a knife ready to end every peace-talk. “Only to doubt him. And doubt this place. They think they’re free, but they believe that land can be cut into pieces, thrown like meat among dogs.”

“I don’t think of life like that,” Beren answers. Whenever he is out from under the broad roof, he faces south.

He is in love with Luthien. Wachiwi understands, or is beginning to. Luthien is a beauty, of course, in the way that beauty exists in far-off peaks, capped in sun and snow, or in a stream of healing water. Wachiwi has never questioned love for Luthien. But the way that that heart-hold changes Beren…

That, in warm yellow and raven-dark and blinking blue, now has meaning of its own for her.

Sun up, sun down. Again and again, the nights stretching longer, until the end of what the others call a week. Winter is not bitter here. The winters of this land were not formed for killing, but for sleep. Burrow and wait, rest and learn. Distrust should be held in view but not applied like a weight or a weapon. Taking on these lessons despite her frustrations, Wachiwi has begun to find good people, here. Phillips and his sister. Red Cloud, of her people. A handful of others, and those who crossed the water with them—Estrela, Sticks, Frog.

Wachiwi always wants a family. She never learned how to forget that.

The hall, divided for sleeping quarters, begins to have a pattern. Fingolfin’s children and their cousins sleep near each other, but Fingolfin and Fingon are almost always gone. They are with Maedhros, the half-dead man who was, somehow, full half of Fingon’s life. As with all things that are healing, Maedhros needs them most at night.

Wachiwi makes her bed not far from theirs, but at first she wonders where the children and Estrela have gone. They do not stay in the hall; enough mornings, enough straw in their hair, tells her that they are sleeping in the stables.

Wachiwi is not sure if it is by choice. She resolves to speak of it to Estrela, which begs only opportunity, for they are friendly with one another. Ever since the frail, scarred woman was brought back to their traveling camp, Wachiwi has been interested in her. Wachiwi has lost people she loved, but it is a different crime—and no less cruel—when the self is taken from the self.

From girlhood, she knew of the Great Mystery…knew of Him daily, because everything that held the earth together, sun and moon and stars and mountains, were His. If you kept the sun happy, you kept Him happy, and in so doing, ensured peace in your own life.

She honored earth and sky. Her family died anyway. She did not cease to believe, but her belief changed. She felt the touch of uncertainty, the bitter understanding that there were worlds between her and her creator. Each new existence disrupted the connection between maker and made. Endless stories, in which blue was an eye and not the sun’s drawn bow. In which warmth was touch rather than summer.

In which death was violence, brought by others’ hands. Estrela shows her that much more.

None of His gifts, even if ill-used, would turn against man or woman as Estrela’s world has turned against her.

The opportunity for questions comes in the stables after all. The little boy, Frog, clings to Beren like a burr, and Wachiwi happily accompanies them to a vacant stall where a mother cat is suckling four kittens. Cats, in her experience, are the fierce hill-beasts, but these are very small and delicate, their claws no longer than the thorns of desert-roses.

“Red?” Frog asks, pointing to a black-and-silver fluff.

“No, you can’t call him _Red_ ,” Sticks huffs. “He isn’t, even! None of them are.”

Frog rocks back on his heels, his lips pushed forward and his brows pushed down.

There is Estrela, her arms folded, her face smiling.

Her face, always smiling, whether she wants it to or not.

Wachiwi nods a greeting, moves to join her. Beren has crouched down in the straw.

“You’ve been sleeping here?” Wachiwi asks.

Estrela shrugs. “It’s what they know.”

She means the children. She means their old life. Worlds between them; year after year, her crooked face telling one story, her still shapely hands, another.

“You belong with us,” Wachiwi says, echoing words she has spoken time and again, to Fingon. Fingon, who is all sun at his heart, breaking the clouds of winter and grief. When she first knew him, the clouds were inside him.

Estrela turns to look at her, empty eye first. More than the eye is missing; the lid, too. Fully gone. Wachiwi is not made of the mountains, of the moon. She is hurt to see that.

She thinks this is why she was almost angry over Celegorm, angry over someone wanting a thing cut in pieces.

“That is kind of you,” Estrela says. “Thank you, Wachiwi.”

Her voice is beautiful. It comes from the deep. Wachiwi wishes that Estrela knew that.

Fingon is just as difficult to reach, though she knows him—knew him—better. In Mithrim, he is rarely near. All their way west, after the winter, whether he brooded or not, he was _there_. There, though his mouth and eyes were lost in something far, far behind him. Beside him, Wachiwi waited, and lightly teased, and prided herself on not letting the past be her heart and body. The rule of His world—one that had persisted, unchanged, in her belief—was that some beings had only the power you gave them. The past was like that.

Here, Fingon is gone because his past has returned to him, in the form of _Maedhros-Maitimo-Russandol_ , a many-named one-handed man who is hidden from the sight of almost everyone.

Fingon went to the mountain, to the sky, and tore his heart out of it.

In this way, Wachiwi’s world changes too.

Moments with him (with Fingon) become precious. Sometimes he obeys his father, in those first, long days of their week, and stumbles out of the sickroom to eat or sleep. Sometimes he allows Wachiwi to comb and braid his hair.

He doesn’t know what that means to her, to her past, but since she keeps it secret, she keeps the meaning small.

She waits five nights before she asks, “How is he? Your cousin?”

“Better,” Fingon says, too quickly. He has been slow to answer nearly every other question she has posed. “Much better. I think—I think when I found him, I could not have hoped for such a recovery.”

Wachiwi is one for jest, or, if that is not warranted, an honest word. She finds herself in silence now. There is nothing to say, because Fingon has already said what he wants to believe.

Wachiwi knows how great the power of one’s own self can be, in choosing what to believe.

(You choose until you can choose no longer.)

“Can he eat, yet?”

“He will have to.” Fingon rakes a hand through his hair, but stops when he reaches the root of one of her careful plaits. He drops his hand, flushing. “I do not think he will like it, though. Food, to an invalid…it can be unpleasant, at first. You forget to enjoy it.”

“What did he eat…before? That he enjoyed.”

Fingon’s whole face pinches with earnest thought. Wachiwi’s smile is warm in her bones, but she could not show it on her lips. Not yet. At last, he says,

“We would need cornmeal. And molasses.”


End file.
